Robert bridges published his second edition of Milton's Prosody in 1921. It was a study both highly promising and a little repulsive. Modestly, in his whimsical preface (p. iv), he referred to it as his “poor little grammar.” And in one very important sense, that is what it actually was: a grammar, or grammatical prosody, of the verse of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. What the poet's modesty concealed, however, was that underneath the linguistic surface, which was almost Teutonic in its precision and thoroughness, there lay, scattered but brilliant, an ore of metrical theory. For example, it is from Bridges as much as from anybody that we have derived the notion of “scansion divorced from rhythm,” of speech-accents counter-pointing metrical accents. Historically more important, I think, is the debt we owe Bridges for restoring to its original dignity the broadly European metrical system, characteristic of the Renaissance and of Milton, which Bridges called the “syllabic” system. It was he, surely, who first approached that system without a strong bias in favor of a stress prosody, or of a prosody insisting on extra-metrical liberties, and who consequently saw in it not only a rigid side—the syllable-count—but a flexible side, wherein genuine musical variation was possible—the manifold devices of “elision.”

To students of the classics the Roman practice of declamation has long been known as an influence on Roman satire and drama and on the early Greek romance. Apparently this rhetorical exercise is less well known to students of English drama, for in the standard histories and editions there is little to be found on the subject. Yet the controversia, the most important form of declamation, affected English drama early and late. A Renaissance imitation of a controversia furnished the plot of the earliest surviving secular play in English, Henry Medwall's Fulgens and Lucrece (1497?), and some of the Roman originals provided the most fashionable dramatists of the Jacobean era with plots for a number of plays. Of these, Massinger and Field's The Fatal Dowry (1618-19?), whose source has not previously been identified, is an unusually fine example of the transformation of controversia into drama. The early interlude and the later tragedy, examined side by side, reveal much of the operation of this special branch of classical rhetoric. I shall suggest that the controversia gave much more than plots to the English playwrights—that it influenced literary theory, method, and style.

The Beowulfian dragon seems to keep as jealous a watch on the mystery of its ultimate significance in the poem as on the buried hoard. And when a critic boldly tries to force the entrance of the monster's barrow, he must sooner or later reckon with a shattering counter-stroke. Though it looked as if Professor Tolkien's brilliant attempt had finally disposed of the problem, it appears that the dragon was dormant only and the retour de flamme has now come, more than fifteen years later, in the form a of competent and courageous article, vigorously questioning the legitimacy of the critic's progress. Mr. Gang's article—and this is not the least of its merits—clearly raises the question of premises and methods in Beowulf criticism, and lucidly probes the actual base of Tolkien's interpretation of the poem. We shall not venture to decide the point (much too perilous a plight for minnows to judge the Triton's issue). Moreover, to examine so dense an article in all its implications would mean an extensive study. Our modest purpose here is merely to discuss, with special reference to the dragon, Mr. Gang's main contention, viz., “that the arguments by which Professor Tolkien shows that the poem may be symbolic are not cogent, and that the internal evidence is against this view, or at least against the particular symbolism that he discerns” (p. 6).